Barnabas Monkeypants

I’m starting to worry less.

In the grand scheme of things, I still worry a lot (and there is still a lot to worry about), but I only wake up two or three times a night and look at the baby instead of four or five. This is good; this is an improvement. Hopefully, when he turns 18, it’ll be down to once. Maybe.

Kristen worries, too, but not as much (thankfully). I think worry is a good thing. You want to be concerned about your child. You want everything to be okay. You want to be aware of every little thing that has happened.

Of course, this can go a little overboard.

An example. Kristen takes several different vitamins every morning, all with the purpose of keeping herself healthy as well as Henry (since she is his only source of food). One of those is a fish oil pill (which is high in Omega-3; I don’t know what Omega-3 is [mutant alien chemical] or what it does [possibly a super power inducer], but if she wants to take them, she can).

Well, during one early morning feeding — this was during the first two weeks Henry was born — I’m handing Kristen a burp cloth that was on the edge of the bed. Under the burp cloth, however, right on the bed, was a toe. It was a baby’s toe. It was my baby’s toe. And it had fallen off his foot. My heart sank. What is to become of my 9-toed son? What ridicule will he face when wearing flip flops or going swimming? Will he ever marry? Will this mean that other toes will soon fall off?

As the questions raced through my mind, I felt dizzy. Before falling into a complete and utter panic, I was able to right myself. My rational mind (which hasn’t been rational for some time) started asking questions that may actually be pertinent to the situation. Was there any blood? No, no blood. Was there a nail on the toe? No, no nail. Why was the toe twice the size of his other toes? Well, he could be growing fast, I suppose. Why was the toe transparent and yellow? Because it’s not a toe at all.

It’s a fish oil pill.

I nearly lost my mind over a fish oil pill.

Since Kristen was feeding Henry and was staring into his beautiful blue eyes, she missed my hours of panic (I say hours because it felt that long; in fact, it was likely 5 seconds), and I didn’t even tell her about it until a couple of days later, because I was afraid that she’d laugh in my face. (She did.)

But I’ve gotten much better, and now I wouldn’t start worrying about his lost toe until he actually does lose a toe. Now I worry about the bigger things (like, my God, did you know how much it costs to have a baby, even when you have health insurance), and I’ve left my crazy mind behind us.

So that’s what we’ve learned about me. What have we learned about Henry this week?

We learned that Henry loves–just loves–to dance. We don’t know yet if his brand is of the jazz or modern or ballet or hip-hop variety, but when he starts pumping those legs and waving those arms, he’s smiling ear to ear and it doesn’t really matter. Both Kristen and I love to dance with him (she’s partial to the waltz; I fancy a jitterbug), and he loves dancing with us. That’s nice.

We learned that sleeping nine hours in a row is great for everyone in the entire family. All except for waking up. After a short nap, Henry slowly arises with wonderful chirps and coos and grunts. When we get him out of his swaddle, he stretches his arms and legs and will smile at us. Lovely, really. Waking up after nine hours, however, there are no coos. There are no smiles. There are only screams. Loud ones, and loud ones that tend to sound even louder when happening at 4:12 in the morning. As soon as he starts eating, however, the screams stop, so the rush to change his diapers and get Kristen ready is a frantic one.

We learned that although we’re not under the flight path of jets coming into or leaving O’Hare Airport, we get our own supersonic screeches several times a day, those being Henry having a particularly large and loud bowel movement. He’s slowed down on the frequency (remember how I was worried about that?), but has kept up with the potency.

And we learned that Henry has started to learn that screams (those not of the 4 AM variety) mean that mommy or daddy come running. It’s strange, though, that as soon as we get there, the screams stop and are replaced with smiles.

He’s a smart one, our son.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under What We've Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.